Find Me

Near the end of the year, I put together a list of tweets of some of my favorite tools for keeping mu cool. They ranged across tricks & websites for tracking/analyzing your sales, places to get stock photos and make promo pics, and ways to format & convert your ebooks. It was a tangle of all my favorite bookmarks and programs, presented in 140 chars or less.

Okay, here we go. Off the top of my head, the List Of My Favorite Tools & Tricks To Not Lose My Cool, Vaguely Grouped By Type…

It’s been a while since I had time to post, but a few people have needed this lately, and I decided it would be smartest to just upload it for easy future linking. (That is how I make all my important decisions about blogging: being lazy.)

A lot of people are trying to maneuver around facebook’s 20% text rule for when you can boost a post or use an image for advertising. It’s especially frustrating because the exact same amount of text on an image might be denied one week and approved the next if the text isn’t in the exact same place.

There’s a reason for that. As of now (which could change tomorrow) facebook’s automated system is using a grid method to decide when an image has too much text. They put a grid of five rectangles by five rectangles over your image and look to see if the text shows up in more than five of them. (20%)

Computers are not always terribly reliable though.

Yeah, I know. Computers. SIGH.

Anyway, it’s pretty easy to get around this once you know it’s a thing. I have two templates I share–one is a PSD file with the grid on its own layer, one is a transparent PNG file you can download and put over your image. If you can keep your text in five of those boxes, you SHOULD be okay. (Should in that computers are still silly and will sometimes think things like tattoos or squiggles are also text, because oh, COMPUTERS.)

Facebook Ad Template (PNG)

A transparent PNG with the grid that helps identify how much text is too much for a facebook ad.

Share this:

People ask me, “What should I do for promotion?!” more often than you’d believe. Not that it’s surprising–it’s a great question. I ask myself that basically every day. What should I do for promotion?!

My basic rules of promotion:

Give people a reason to want to talk about my books…

…without annoying them…

…and without requiring (or encouraging) them to annoy the people around them.

It can be hard to come up with a great example, but the HBO show The Leftovers just implemented one that has 100% worked on me. After watching the pilot of the show, I tweeted that I had no idea what was going on, and that delighted me. Last week, the show DMd me saying they wanted to send me something. I was intrigued, so I provided an address. I got this:

Creepy file is creepy…but so is the show. I expected something like this…
(Note: some of the info in the file is from READING my tweets. I pity whoever had to do that job. Also, the note there is my original tweet.)

A lighter, a sign, and a pre-paid cellphone identified as my new burner phone. OH. MY.

And the phone already had one text message waiting…

Since the first thing I did was whip out my phone to tweet pictures of the creepy care package, this basically accomplished exactly what was intended. And since I’ll be getting text messages on this phone, presumably related to new episodes, it’s the promo that keeps on giving. Because you know I will be tweeting creepy text messages with delight.

Now obviously, we can’t all be sending people cell phones. But this is an example of a way to make people want to be engaged. At the end of the day, you can’t buy someone’s earnest interest. But you can cultivate it once it appears. You can give them ways to engage that increase it. Unfortunately, you have to be creative, usually. Nothing works better than something no one else has ever seen or done. (And once you do something, other people will copy it. Which means you’ll have to come up with the next thing no one has ever seen or done.)